8 Of The Grey’s Anatomy’s Most WTF Medical Cases—Analyzed and Ranked

This does make great TV, but would any of it actually happen in real life? When we watch Grey’s Anatomy, the last thing we would expect out of it is a realistic portrayal of the health-care industry. We relish every bit of the dark, dramatic twists when it comes to the fan-favorite couples (Meredith and Derek! Cristina and Owen! Callie and Arizona!), and, of course, the patients in the emergency room. With more than 200 episodes in the past 11 years, show creator Shonda Rhimes has delivered some incredibly tear-jerking and unbelievable stories. But could any of these scenarios happen to, you know, real people (in real life)? “They have a sprinkling of real medicine [on the show],” says Darria Gillespie, M.D., assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and executive vice president of Sharecare. “The reality is, we see crazy things in the ER. And so in some of the cases, they’re able to pull from reality and others are kind of a stretch and a dramatization of them. But that’s the craziness and beauty of the ER—you never know what you’re going to see.” Here are some of the over-the-top cases that had us wide-eyed to our television sets, ranked from the least bizarre to the most:

8 The 70-Pound Tumor in a woman (Season 1)

This character died all right after a 14-hour surgery! However, that doesn’t tame the fact that she had a freaking 70-pound tumor in her body. “That’s not impossible, especially in some malignancies like ovarian cancer,” says Gillespie. “Part of the problem with ovarian [cancer] is that [a tumor] can grow for a long time without somebody noticing—they may just feel bloated. And if you have someone who’s obese, then yes, it’s possible. This one is so not far from the truth.” In fact, in a 2013 report in the Huffington Post said that a 556-pound man in Oregon had a 70-pound tumor in his abdomen.
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7. The Divorced Couple Who Got Stuck Together During Sex (Season 3)

Her IUD latched onto his penis piercing! Oh, and Addison Montgomery (McDreamy’s ex-wife, in case you’ve forgotten) ‘accidentally’ happened to announce this in front of the couple’s daughter—making this one of the painful and most awkward moment on so many levels. “An IUD has a string on it, which is how you retrieve it when you want to take it out,” says Gillespie, who notes that while this is theoretically possible, this has never been seen. “Never in our wildest dreams can we ever imagine a piercing could somehow get stuck onto that string of the IUD.”